"You've learned how to talk in long sentences since I last saw you."

Dal laughed. "I've felt freer."

"I brought you a present." Bergen handed him the release from the contract.

Dal read it, laughed, read it again, and then wept.

"Bergen," he said, "you don't know. You don't know how hard it's been."

"I can guess."

"I haven't been able to take the examination. Heaven knows, I've hardly been able to live. But now--"

"More than that," Bergen said. "The examination costs three thousand. I brought it." He handed the money to his friend.

Dal held the money for a few seconds, then handed it back. "Your father's dead, then."

"Yes," Bergen said.

"I'm sorry. It must have been a shock to you."

"You didn't know?"

"I don't read papers. I don't have a radio. And my draughts were never returned."

"Contracts are contracts, the executors figured. Trust my father not to free his contract servants in his will."

They chuckled wryly in memory of the man, whom Dal had last seen three years ago, whom Bergen had last seen yesterday.

"Your mother?"

"The bitch died in heat," Bergen answered, and this time there was emotion. Dal touched his hand. "I'm sorry." And it was Bergen's turn to weep.

"Thank God you're my friend," Bergen said at last.

"And you mine," Dal answered.

And then the door opened and a woman walked in carrying a child that couldn't have been a year old. She was startled to see Bergen there. "Company," she said. "Hello. I'm Anda."

"I'm Bergen," Bergen said.

"My friend Bergen," Dal introduced them. "My wife Anda. My son Bergen."

Anda smiled. "He told me you were bright and beautiful, and so our son had to be named after you. He was right."

"You're too kind."

The conversation was good after that, but it was not what Bergen had expected. There couldn't be the banter, the in-jokes, the delightful gutter talk, the insults that Bergen and Dal bad known for years, not with Anda there. And so they parted with friendship in the air-- but a hollow feeling in Bergen's stomach. Dal had refused his gift of the examination fee, and accepted only his freedom. He would share that freedom with Anda. Bergen went back to the sleeproom and used the rest of his new entitlement.

When he awoke the next time, things had changed. With Crove now called Capitol, there was an incredible building boom. And Bergen's companies were deeply involved.

The building was haphazard, and Bergen began to realize that it wasn't enough just to throw buildings into the air. Capitql would be the center of trade and government for hundreds of planets. Billions of people. He could conceive of it eventually becoming one vast city. And so be began to plan accordingly.

He set his architects to planning a structure that would cover a hundred square miles and house fifty million people, heavy industry, light industry, transportation, distribution, and communication. The roof of the building had to be strong enough not only to handle the takeoffs and landings of landing craft, but also to cope with the weight of the huge starships themselves. It would take years to design-- he gave them the obvious deadline of his next waking after five years of sleep.

And then he spent the rest of the year lobbying with the bureaucrats to get his plan, already taking shape, adopted as the master plan for the planet. Every city designed the same way, so that as the population boomed, the cities could link up floor to floor and pipe to pipe and form a continuous, unbroken city with a spaceport for a roof and its roots deep in the bedrock. When his time was up, he had won-- and the contracts almost all went to Bergen Bishop's companies.

He did not forget Dal, however. He found him by his paintings, which were now gaining some note. It was difficult to talk, however.

"Bergen. The rumors are flying."

"Good to see you, Dal."

"They say you're stripping the planet right down to the bedrock and putting steel on top."

"Here and there."

"They say it's all supposed to interlock."

Bergen shrugged it off. "There'll be huge parks. Huge tracts of land untouched."

"Until the population needs it. Right? Always that reservation."

Bergen was hurt. "I came to talk about your painting."

"Here, then," Dal said. "Have a look." And he handed Bergen a painting of a steel monster that was settling like pus onto the countryside.

"This is repulsive," Bergen said.

"It's your city. I took it from the architect's renderings."

"My city isn't this ugly."

"I know. It's an artist's job to make beauty more beautiful and ugliness uglier."

"The Empire has to have a capital somewhere."

"Does there have to be an empire?"

"What's made you so bitter?" Bergen asked, genuinely concerned. "People have been tearing up planets for years. What's getting to you?"

"Nothing's getting to me."

"Where's Anda? Where's your son?"

"Who knows? Who cares?" Dal walked to a painting of a sunset and shoved his fist through it.

"Dal!" Bergen shouted. "Don't do that!"

"I made it. I can destroy it."

"Why'd she leave?"

"I failed the merit test. She had an offer of marriage from a guy who could take her on somec. She accepted."

"How could you fail the merit test?"

"They can't measure my paintings. And when you're twenty-six years old, the requirements are higher. Much, much higher."

"Twenty-six-- but we're only--"

"You're only twenty-one. I'm twenty-six and aging fast." Dal walked to the door and opened it. "Get out of here, Bergen. I'm dying fast. In a couple of your years I'll be an old man who isn't worth a damn so don't bother looking me up anymore. Get on out there and wreck the planet while there's still a profit in it."

Bergen left, hurt and unable to understand why Dal should suddenly hate him. If Dal had only taken the money Bergen offered two years before, he could have taken the test when he could still have passed it. It was his own fault, not Bergen's. And blaming Bergen for it wasn't fair.

For three wakings, Bergen didn't took Dal up. The memory of Dal's bitterness was too harsh, too hurtful. Instead Bergen concentrated on building his cities. Half a million men were working on them, a dozen cities arising simultaneously on the plain. There was plenty of land left undisturbed, but the cities rose so high that the winds were broken and the whiptrees died. How could anyone have known that the seeds had to fall to the earth from no more than a meter off the ground, and that without wind strong enough to bend the trees all the way to the ground, the seeds would fall too far and break and die? In fifty years the last of the whiptrees would be gone. And it was too late to do anything about it. Bergen grieved for the whiptrees. He was sorry. The cities were already filling up with people. The starships were already coming in to land at the only spaceport in the galaxy large enough and strong enough to hold them. There was no going back.

On his fourth waking, however, Bergen learned that he had been promoted to a one year up, ten years down somec level, and he realized that if Dal still wasn't on somec, the man would be in his mid-forties, and in the next waking would be getting old. Bergen was only in his mid-twenties. And suddenly he regretted having stayed away from Dal for so long. It was a strange thing about somec. It cut you off from people. Put you in different timestreams, and Bergen realized that soon the only people he would know would be those who had exactly the same somec schedule as he.

Most of his old friends he wouldn't mind losing. After all, he had survived losing both his parents in his first sleep. But Dal was a different matter. He hadn't seen Dal for three waking years, and,he missed him. They had been so close up till then.